SEMANTICS

 

SEMANTICS

 

It is the study of the relationship between the linguistics forms and entities in the world, that is, how words literally connect to things (meaning). It is a major branch of linguistics devoted to the study of meaning in language.

There are two subfields of semantics :

-         lexical semantics : concern with the meaning of words and the meaning relationships among words

-         sentential semantics : concerns with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word

there 3 types of meaning :

1. lexical meaning : the real meaning which is appropriate with our sense observation. Example : the upper body part of nose
2. grammatical meaning : it appears as the causes of word function in sentences. Example : Mirna    hits     the man

                         actor    active  target

3. contextual meaning : the meaning of single word in  one context of sentence

example : 3 x 4   it can means 12 or 5000 (based on the context place and object)

                12. if it is asked to the students at school

                                                   Object          place

                5000 . if it asked to the photographer at photo studio

                                                        Object                   place

 

referential meaning and non referential meaning

a. referential meaning is a meaning of word directly relates  with the references.

    e.g. horse,picture the word have referential meaning because they have references in real word.

b. non referential meaning is a meaning of word unrelates with the references.

    e.g. and, or => no refential meaning, they have no references.

denotative and conotative meaning

a. denotative meaning is the true meaning of word. in addition denotative meaning is often used by society.

     e.g. matanya bulat, bibirnya merah, etc.

b. conotative meaning is not the original meaning, so speaker must translete the original meaning, so that listener understand about what his mean.

     e.g. panjang tangan, it does not mean that the hand is long, but it demonstrates to people who likes stealing others' things.

associative meaning is a meaning of single word that has relationship with something others.

e.g.'white is identical with pure

       green is denoted as fresh or peace.

 

 

Affective and collocatieve meaning

1. affective meaning shows reaction of listener using word or sentence

e.g. could you bring me salt, please! Compared to: bring the salt to me!

The 1^st one is more polite than the last one.

2. collocative meaning relates by using word in any particular situation on the same environment

e.g. synonym of cantik.=>(handsome/beautiful). However, we can not say agus d.p is beautiful, because in this case, agus d.p is man so that we must replace with handsome, beautiful is for women.

 

RELATIONS OF MEANING

 

1.Synonym

consists of same meaning

ex: start-begin, bodoh-dungu, next to-near, etc.

 

2.Antonym

the opposite meaning

ex: clever x stupid, high x low, big x small, etc.

 

3.Homonym

the similarity on sounds and written

ex: sanksi-sangsi

                  massa-masa

 

4.Homophones

sounds identical but are written differently

ex: site=tempat

     sight =penglihatan

 

5.Homograph

written identically but sound differently

ex:lead=timah

    lead= peranan,penting,petunjuk

 

6.Polisemy

a word which has two(or more) rated meanings

ex: kepala( bagian tubuh/instansi)

     teras(pejabat/bagian rumah

SEMATIC FEATURES

      Words maybe intersecting sematics classes. for example woman in the class of property "female";child in the class of young and girl is in the intersecting class with the two properties' female ' and 'young'. such relationship could be expressed in by semantics features, similar to phonetic features. in this case the lexical entries for word such as father, girl, and mare would have the following appearence:

woman         father      girl            mare

+female     +male     +female     +female

+human     +human     +human     -human

-young        +parent     +young     - young     etc...